The Cincinnati Red Stalkings (26 page)

“You think you could have?”

“If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have damn well made sure I stopped him.” He folded his hands a little tighter over the head of his walking stick. “Couple hours before dawn, Josiah came knocking at my window. Said there’d been an accident: the girl had a seizure and died. He wanted me to help bury her.

“At first I argued, saying he should take her to a doctor or contact her family. He said she’d told him she had no family, and he didn’t even know her last name. Only her first: Sarah. Josiah was all agitated, worrying that a scandal would dash his own future. Don’t know why I agreed to help him—maybe it didn’t seem real or it was the hour of the night or it was because of our long friendship—but I did. Got a couple of shovels and the two of us drove to Mount Adams with Sarah’s body wrapped in a blanket behind the seat.

“We dug a grave, and then I froze. I couldn’t touch her, couldn’t help Josiah lay her in the ground. He did it himself, and in the course of moving her, part of the blanket fell away. She didn’t die of a seizure. There was a red stocking knotted around her neck.”

“Did he see you notice it?”

“Didn’t say so at the time, but he noticed.”

“You never went to the police?”

“I wanted to. The next day, I told Josiah he ought to confess and make the best of it. Said if he didn’t, I’d go to the police myself and report what happened. That’s when I found out that he was totally amoral.”

“What’d he say?”

“It’s what he’d done. When he put her in the grave, he put that watch of mine under her. It had my name and birthday engraved on it. If I ever told anyone and they dug her up, they’d find the watch. Josiah said he would swear that
I
killed her.”

“Jeez. Couldn’t you dig her up yourself and take the watch?”

“No. I considered it, but I knew I couldn’t. Josiah knew it, too. He saw that I couldn’t even touch her to carry her to the grave. No way could I dig her up and go feeling around for a watch.”

This wasn’t the way I’d imagined his story would go. After the meeting with Nathaniel Bonner in Adela Whitaker’s office, I’d been trying to figure out who had killed Sarah if not Ambrose. What led me to think it was Josiah Bonner wasn’t merely his resemblance to Dick Hurley or the fact that he was one of the few men at the banquet young enough to pass for a player. I believed the attempted extortion by his son—and the fact that it occurred only after Josiah was hospitalized—had to be more than coincidence. The scenario I envisioned was that Josiah Bonner and Ambrose Whitaker had been at a standoff over the decades; Bonner with evidence of Whitaker’s embezzlement from the team, and Whitaker with the knowledge that Bonner had killed Sarah.

But it sounded like Josiah Bonner already had an effective way of keeping the former bookkeeper silent without the threat of going public about the embezzlement. So how did that fit in?

“Josiah Bonner wasn’t the only one with a secret crime, though, was he?” I took the ledger pages from my pocket and held them out to him. “You were stealing money from the ball club.” Since Ambrose Whitaker appeared relieved to be finally telling the story, I hoped he’d give the rest of it.

His bushy eyebrows merged in a frown. “Haven’t seen these in fifty years,” he said. “Yes, I took money from the club. Only way I had to pay Josiah.”

“
Pay
him?”

“It was a small step for him from threatening to use the watch to implicate me if I went to the police to blackmailing me for cash. More cash than I could raise legally.”

“So you took it from the team.”

“Yes. And like I said before, the club was not a great financial success. The funds I took might have kept the club going for a while longer. Josiah came to think that, too. When the club started selling off its mementos, he managed to get the accounting ledgers. And when the new Reds team joined the National League in 1876, he said he would expose me as being the cause of the earlier club going bankrupt. By then, I’d started working on the inclined railways, and was earning a good living. Bonner wanted regular payments. And when I started my own business, he took ‘consulting’ fees. With the money he got from me, he bought controlling interest in the lumber company.”

Josiah Bonner sure had Whitaker in a tight grip. “How long did it go on?”

“Until a few years ago. Josiah got sick, and had to go into a home. Hardly knows his own name anymore. So I stopped making the payments.”

We sat in silence for a little while. He appeared to have gotten anything he wanted to say out of his system. And I was out of questions.

I finally thought of one more. “You went through all the trouble of putting that note in the baseball,” I said. “Why didn’t you give the details—and the names?”

He looked at me sadly. “Because I don’t have any more guts now than I had in ’69.”

“Yes you do. You’ve told what happened now.” I folded the pages from the account books. “If anything else comes up, can I talk to you again?”

“Certainly, son.” He looked disappointed when I put the ledger sheets in my pocket; I was pretty sure he would have liked to have them.

Margie was a trouper, all right. I could see that her heart wasn’t in it, but she went through with her performance, first telling a group of enthralled kids an entertaining fable about how tigers got their stripes and then explaining how the pattern really helped the animals stay hidden in tall grass.

I joined her after the show, and the two of us went into the Carnivora House, where she changed from her jungle outfit into a loose yellow summer dress.

“That was my last performance,” she said when she came out of the ladies’ rest room.

“What happened?”

“I quit.” She packed her clothes and a few other items into a canvas satchel. “The zoo isn’t pressing charges against the keeper for the meat theft.”

“Why not?”

“They decided it wouldn’t be good publicity for either the zoo or the sausage makers. Mr. Stephan said that as much as he would have liked to see the men in jail, they wouldn’t have served much time—if any—and that it was probably better to make another arrangement.”

I took the satchel from her. “What arrangement?”

“Both the keeper who was stealing the meat and the attendant who was selling the dead animals have been fired, and they have to pay back all the money they got. And Maynard Kimber is going to make an additional donation to the zoo to hire another full-time veterinarian.”

“Maybe that will do more good in the long run.”

“I understand the reasoning,” Margie admitted. “I just wish Mr. Stephan would have taken my suggestion, too.”

“And what was that?”

“To put the keeper who was stealing the animals’ food in a cage for a few days—with nothing to eat.”

I could tell that if it was up to her, she would have done exactly that. “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

I
had no intention of going public with the fact that Josiah Bonner had murdered Sarah Devlin fifty-two years ago. To what end? It was unlikely that a prosecutor would file charges against him at this late date, especially since he was ailing and probably didn’t have much time to live. And if Bonner had dementia, like his son said, he would probably be found unfit to stand trial anyway.

No, it wasn’t Josiah Bonner I wanted to get. My target was Nathaniel.

Margie and I stayed up late waiting for Karl to get home. He finally got in at three o’clock, looking tired and a bit inebriated. He also had a cocky smirk on his lips that I knew meant he’d turned up something worthwhile.

“That was an adventure,” he said, plopping onto the sofa. “Quite a bunch of characters you have in this city.”

“Any trouble?”

Karl affected a miffed expression. “I’ve exposed crooked politicians, union busters, and slumlords. You think I can’t handle a few sports and bookies?”

Oh yeah, I could picture him fitting right in with the city’s gambling element—like a glass of Moxie in a gin mill. “What did you find out?”

“Rufus Yates did have a connection to Arnold Rothstein. A distant one, but important.” Karl gave us his report like a professor lecturing a class of dullards. “At the start of the 1919 World Series, rumors were rife that the fix was in. Bookmakers all around the country were watching closely to see who placed bets and on which team. If a major gambler like Rothstein put a large sum on the underdog, the odds would have changed drastically. So Rothstein, who operates out of New York, tried to get all the local Cincinnati boys he could to front for him. It was expected that folks here would bet on the hometown team, so that didn’t raise any eyebrows.”

“Must have taken a lot of people to put all that money down,” I said. “I heard there were hundreds of thousands of dollars bet on the series.”

“One man put down over twenty thousand of that,” Karl said. “Not all with one bookie, but I’ve been totaling up his bets.”

“It wasn’t Yates,” I said. “They’d know
he
couldn’t come up with that much money on his own.”

Then I realized who it had to be. Karl and I said in one voice, “Lloyd Tinsley.”

No one would have questioned a Reds official placing bets on his own team.

“Yates must have gotten Tinsley to front for Rothstein,” I said. Maybe they’d been involved in similar activities together back in Wichita. Or maybe Tinsley thought he’d never take over Frank Bancroft’s job as business manager and decided to make his fortune by accepting Yates’s proposal. “Wonder how much Tinsley got out of it?”

“I understand ten percent of the winnings is the standard fee for such a service,” Karl said. One night with the sporting types, and he thinks he’s an expert.

Margie spoke up. “What about Rufus Yates approaching the Reds players to try to get them to throw the series the other way? That doesn’t make sense.”

Karl answered, “It was a token effort, and it didn’t come until a couple of games into the series. The word was out about Rothstein fixing the series, and the odds had dropped. Yates just wanted to get the rumor mill going the other way—to swing the odds back in Rothstein’s favor, not to change the outcome.”

We finally all decided to call it a night. On the way upstairs, I asked, “How much you lose, Karl?”

His shoulders sagged. “Hundred and twenty.”

I didn’t think his newfound expertise had come cheaply. “I’ll give it to you in the morning. And thanks for all you did tonight.”

“Hope it helps.”

“Me too.” I only wished I knew how it could.

I was wishing even harder when I read the telegram that arrived for me in the morning. It was from Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He wanted to see me in his office ten o’clock Monday morning. This was Thursday, and I’d have to be on a train by Sunday. That meant I had three days to find a way of convincing him that I had nothing to do with Rufus Yates when he was alive and had no involvement in his death.

My first step was to put in a call to Detective Forsch. I asked if Nathaniel Bonner had admitted setting me up with Yates.

“No,” the detective answered. “Matter of fact, he isn’t talking at all. His lawyers are doing that for him. And one of the things they’re saying is that they want kidnapping charges filed against you and Aaron and Adela Whitaker.”

“His lawyers claim that the three of you coerced his ‘confession’ from him at gunpoint.”

“That’s not true! Aaron didn’t put the shotgun on him until he tried to leave. Everything he said was voluntary—you heard it.”

“No, I didn’t. The recording you technical geniuses made sounds like one long hissing noise. You must have had the phone too far away.”

Jeez. “What if the three of us testify about what he said?”

“Well, that’s something. But not a whole lot. We can’t just go by what somebody says they heard. We got to have proof.”

“Well, that’s not—”

He cut me off. “I wouldn’t complain about that if I were you. Remember, there’s this Knucksie goon who says you tried to hire him to kill Rufus Yates—but I haven’t arrested you, have I?”

“No.”

“That’s because there’s got to be credible evidence. You and the Whitakers holding a man at gunpoint and then testifying that he confessed something isn’t all that credible is it?”

“But we didn’t—Well, not when you put it that way, it doesn’t.”

“That’s the way his lawyers will put it.”

“So what’s gonna happen?”

“We’ll hold him a little longer.
Maybe
we’ll charge him with attempted extortion, but no way is the district attorney going to go ahead with a murder charge based on what we have now.”

“Did you search his place? Maybe he still has the gun that killed Ollie Perriman—or Rufus Yates.”

“Thanks for the tip on how to do police work. Of course we searched. They were both shot with a thirty-eight. There was no thirty-eight in Bonner’s house.” Anticipating my next question, he added, “Didn’t find one at the lumber company either.”

“All right. Any idea when you might go ahead with the extortion charge?”

“By end of tomorrow. The D.A. says we can’t hold him over the weekend without a charge.”

“At least that will keep him in jail for a while.”

“Not after tomorrow, it won’t. He’ll post bond as soon as we charge him.”

“Damn.” The man who’d admitted murdering Oliver Perriman would be out in twenty-four hours.

Margie and Karl offered a number of suggestions on what to do, but when it came down to a final decision they left it up to me. I was the one who’d had the most contact with Bonner, Tinsley, and the Whitakers, and it was my career that depended on proving to Judge Landis that I was clean. I thought over all sorts of possibilities before settling on the one that seemed most likely to succeed.

I asked Karl, “You know anybody here where you can get something printed up real quick?”

“I used to know a fellow who put out Socialist handbills. But he got sent to jail for it during the war, and I don’t know if he’s back in business.”

“Could you try to track him down?”

“Sure. What do you need?”

I explained what I had in mind. Then Karl left to track down his friend, and Margie went to the library. Neither of them said so, but I could tell they weren’t optimistic that the scheme would work.

I wasn’t either, but there was one man who could help me sell it. I called Ambrose Whitaker.

Friday morning, Ambrose Whitaker and I paid a call on Nathaniel Bonner in Central Station, the holding area in the basement of City Hall for prisoners awaiting trial. Overall, security wasn’t as tight as at the Work House, but our meeting was under the watchful eye of an armed police officer.

Bonner said with a smirk, “You don’t have another Dictaphone with you by any chance.”

“Tried to hide one in my pocket,” I said, “but the guard took it in the search.”

Ambrose Whitaker began, “Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Bonner. I know you are going to find what we have to say to be quite interesting.”

“Nothing else to do in here,” Bonner said. Still smirking, he added, “But make it quick. My lawyer says I’ll be out of here in a couple hours.”

We were out of earshot of the guard, but Whitaker kept his voice low when he continued, “You were quite right about me embezzling from the Red Stockings fifty years ago. But do you know why I did it?”

Bonner snorted. “For the money.”

“That’s right. To make blackmail payments to your father.”

The smirk vanished. “What are you talking about?”

Whitaker then related the same story he’d told me about Josiah Bonner and Sarah Devlin. It was clear from the younger Bonner’s expression that this was news to him. I didn’t think he was aware of what his father had done; otherwise, he wouldn’t have run the risk of exposure by trying to blackmail the Whitakers. It was also clear that he was debating with himself, trying to decide if it was possible that what he was now hearing was the truth.

“What’s your point in spinning a yarn like that?” Bonner asked. “You’re slandering a man who can’t defend himself anymore. I don’t believe a word you say.”

“The point,” Whitaker went on calmly, “is that I am prepared to give a formal statement regarding the events of 1869, and of subsequent years when I paid blackmail money to keep your father in business. Unless . . .”

“Unless what? You want money? You’re going to try a little blackmail of your own?”

“I don’t want money,” Whitaker answered. “And you may call it what you like. The fact of the matter is that unless you give a complete and honest account about the deaths of Oliver Perriman and Rufus Yates, I will proceed to tell my own story.”

Bonner shook his head. “The ramblings of an old man. Nobody’ll believe you.”